Instead of having just a single paratrooper brigade and a Stryker brigade left in Europe when the dust settles, we'll maintain a heavy brigade, as well:
The Department of Defense announced today that it is revising its 2004 plan to withdraw two of its four brigade combat teams (BCTs) from Europe. Based on the administration's review, consultations with allies and the findings of NATO's new Strategic Concept, the department will retain three BCTs in Europe to maintain a flexible and rapidly deployable ground force to fulfill the United States' commitments to NATO, to engage effectively with allies and partners, and to meet the broad range of 21st century challenges. This decision will be implemented in 2015, when we project a reduced demand on our ground forces.
The three BCTs remaining in Europe after 2015 -- the Heavy, Stryker and Airborne BCTs -- offer capabilities that enable U.S. European Command to build partner capacity and to meet interoperability objectives while supporting the full range of military operations, including collective defense of our NATO allies under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
This is better than nothing. It maintains a mix of capabilities that can be quickly deployed to the arc of crisis from Morocco to Afghanistan from European bases. So this is good.
But this doesn't address stability in Europe itself. I'd still rather maintain a full corps with 5 brigades forward deployed, as I wrote in Military Review. That would represent real combat power rather than being a trip wire in Europe. War surely seems unlikely in Europe, but we thought that when we bugged out of Europe after the war to end all wars.
Still, as long as we maintain brigade sets for additional units in Europe (3 heavy sets, I believe, plus a nearby afloat Marine brigade set), we could quickly deploy enough for a real war-fighting capability and maintain NATO as a real military alliance to keep Europe stable. The problem is that during a crisis, sending in new troops is potentially escalatory as opposed to the status quo of already having the forces there.
Still, three brigades are better than two. Unless three is just a countdown to two--or even zero--under budget constraints. That truly would be penny wise and pound foolish thinking.
